Machine components are often manufactured based on the physical and/or functional characteristics that define their desired operation. High quality, precise manufacturing is used to ensure that components will operate as expected and within acceptable tolerances. To verify that components are manufactured according to their specified criteria, manufacturers often perform quality control inspections during and/or following a manufacturing process.
For example, fuel injectors must be manufactured with predetermined dimensions in order to be compatible with a host machine. Further, fuel injectors must be manufactured so that they inject precise amounts of fuel in a manner required for efficient operation of the machine. Therefore, fuel injectors having high-tolerance, small-diameter fuel injector orifices are often manufactured in large quantities. In the manufacture of these fuel injectors, various metrology devices and methods have been used to confirm the geometry of orifices formed in the nozzles of the fuel injectors. Some of these devices include, for example, gage wires, optical measuring microscopes, coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), and Werth machines. Functional measurement has also been used, such as by spraying fuel through the nozzle orifices in a test environment to determine the accuracy and precision of the drilled orifices. Although many of these devices and methods may provide somewhat accurate results, they require human intensive operations, involve little or no automation, and cannot provide consistently repeatable precision.
Recently, attempts have been made to automate the quality-control inspection of various manufactured components by using computed tomography (CT) x-ray imaging. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,895,073 (the '073 patent), issued to Shih et al. on May 17, 2005, discloses a high-speed x-ray inspection apparatus and method. The system of the '073 patent includes three CT x-ray sources and an x-ray detector configured to obtain two-dimensional images of a manufactured component. The images are compared to one or more calibration images of the component, whereby components exceeding a certain threshold are designated as “defective.” Because the system only obtains a limited number of 2-D images, processing time is reduced and automated quality control of the component is expedited.
Although the '073 patent discloses the automated CT x-ray quality control of manufactured components, its usefulness may be limited. Specifically, the number of images provided by the system of the '073 patent may be insufficient to generate a high-resolution image that accurately represents the component. Further, the obtained 2-D images are only compared to the calibration images to determine if a threshold level of accuracy is obtained, without any feedback being provided to the manufacturing process. Therefore, the system may be unable to improve the quality of the manufacturing process itself and the resulting tolerances of the manufactured components.
The present disclosure is directed to overcoming one or more of the shortcomings set forth above.